John le Carré: The author's official website: Author An overview of his history and a word on the Author by the Author. Make sure to follow my personal secretary's notes on Twitter John le Carré is the nom de plume of David John Moore Cornwell, who was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, and was educated at Sherborne School, at the University of Berne (where he studied German literature for a year) and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern languages. He taught at Eton from 1956 to 1958 and was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, serving first as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and subsequently as Political Consul in Hamburg. He started writing novels in 1961, and since then has published twenty-one titles. From the Author “Let me tell you a few things about myself. Not much, but enough. In the old days it was convenient to bill me as a spy turned writer. I was nothing of the kind.

I am a writer who, when I was very young, spent a few ineffectual but extremely formative years in British Intelligence.” “I never knew my mother till I was 21. I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born. My father was a confidence trickster and a gaol bird. Read A Perfect Spy.” “I hate the telephone. I can’t type. I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don’t see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.” “Apart from spying, I have in my time sold bathtowels, got divorced, washed elephants, run away from school, decimated a flock of Welsh sheep with a twenty-five pound shell because I was too stupid to understand the gunnery officer’s instructions, taught children in a special school.” “I have four sons and thirteen grandchildren. It is forty years since I hung up my cloak and dagger. I wrote my first three books while I was a spook; I wrote the next eighteen after I was at large.” “A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself.

And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.” “And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.” “Thank you for your interest, your support, and kind words. Happily, I am deeply engrossed in a new novel. Sadly, this means that I can no longer devote the time and care necessary to responding to enquiries on this website. Please accept my sincere apologies, and address any professional problems you may have to my agents, Messrs Curtis Brown. With best wishes, John le Carre.” See John le Carré’s profile on Curtis Brown here What does John Le Carre have to hide?

- Telegraph Books What does John Le Carre have to hide? The reclusive spy novelist is finally letting a biographer loose on the skeletons in his past, reports Zoe Brennan. Reclusive: legendary spy novelist John Le Carre. Photo: JONATHAN PLAYER/REX FEATURES By Zoe Brennan Comments It could have been a scene straight out of a John le Carré spy novel. Graham Lord, a competent tabloid hack, had been touting his synopsis for a book around London publishers. The document was confidential – it contained salacious details about a famous author’s personal life. It plotted out a thrilling romp through his mistresses, wives, loves and losses – and his work for the secret service. Nothing would be left to the imagination, a publisher would be mad to turn the book down. Within days, threatening letters began landing on Lord’s doormat. Then a writ for libel was served. It turned out that the subject of the book, John le Carré himself, did not want an unauthorised biography written. In the end, it would not be written, for le Carré’s lawyers hounded this small-time writer into submission.

Contacted this week by The Daily Telegraph in the Caribbean, where he now lives, Lord says: “It was a disaster all round. This was 18 years ago. I have no idea how he saw the synopsis, it was an internal document. To this day I have not been able to find out how that happened. “The torment went on for three or four months. I had letters from lawyers arriving every day. It was probably the worst time of my life.” Related Articles John Le Carre donates archive to Oxford University 24 Feb 2011 Asked exactly what the esteemed author objected to, Lord falters. “I don’t dare,” he says quietly. “I just don’t dare go through it again. Sorry not to be more helpful – but it is self-preservation. Unfortunately most of the people he was close to are dead now, although I am sure there is no significance in that.

“All I can say is that he is obviously very attracted to women.” For his part, le Carré said of his bid to stop publication: “I didn’t want him gumshoeing around my children, my ex-mistresses, my everything.” Now, however, the very stories le Carré tried to suppress are about to be told. The 79-year-old espionage writer has given his blessing to academic Adam Sisman to write his life story. Sisman, biographer of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, will be given full access to le Carré’s personal archive. The book is expected to be published in 2014, the 50th anniversary of le Carré’s greatest work, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. The historian and author of Fatherland, Robert Harris, whom le Carré – real name David Cornwell – had previously chosen as his biographer, has put his claim to the writer’s records aside. “I wrote to David more than 20 years ago,” Harris says, “and he agreed to help me if I agreed not to publish until after his death. “I interviewed his wife, and his first wife, and got hold of 400 or more letters.

I signed a contract with Random House to produce a biography and wrote 30,000 words of notes. I devoted months to it. “I got distracted by writing my own novels, so I am happy for Adam to write it. I might do a more impressionistic portrait, but I have a legal agreement with David that anything I know is not to be divulged before his death.” Harris spent a day interviewing Alison Sharp, le Carré’s first wife, who gave him missives written to her by the author. Harris returned them to her former husband when she died in 2009. He adds: “David has become a friend. He is charming, incredibly entertaining, and very bright.” Tantalisingly, he says: “David would himself agree that he has led a colourful life. He objected to Lord’s synopsis because there were things in it that would distress people who were still living. “One thing is certain: David has got a great story to tell. Will people find it shocking? Some will. But I am not able to say.” So why exactly is Cornwell’s story so fascinating? To answer that question, we must go back to the beginning.

Born in 1931, David John Moore Cornwell was the second child of Ronnie and Olive Cornwell, who lived in Poole, Dorset. Olive abandoned the family when Cornwell was five. Of his mother’s disappearance in the middle of the night, Cornwell says: “Presumably she came in and kissed us. I simply don’t know.” As for Ronnie Cornwell, he was a charming confidence trickster and womaniser, who repeatedly made and lost fortunes and spent four years in prison. He was an associate of the Kray brothers in London’s criminal fraternity. So began Cornwell’s fascination with secrets and deception – themes that have come to define his vast output. Cornwell was sent to upper-class preparatory schools, including Pangbourne, Berkshire and Sherborne. Home life was miserable. “I don’t know how many times the bailiffs called,” Cornwell later recalled. “You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.” Cornwell’s school life was unhappy, too. His father constantly defaulted on the fees, and Cornwell hated public school life.

He dropped out to go to Switzerland, where he studied German, and worked for British intelligence, interrogating people who had crossed the Iron Curtain to the West. At 21, he wrote to relatives to ask if his mother was still alive. She replied, telling him to catch a train to Ipswich and meet her at the barrier. It was an awkward reunion. “What does one do?” he said. “Kiss? Shake hands? We hugged. I did feel a bit aggressive about it all. She said such were my father’s powerful contacts that she simply couldn’t have taken us with her. “She had had a lover, a Mr Hill. My father had flings, too. It turned out she was still with her Mr Hill, but throughout the years had had several liaisons with my father. Quite extraordinary.” Cornwell went to Oxford in 1952, graduating with a first-class degree. There he was recruited by MI5, to spy on the far Left. After an unhappy two-year stint teaching German at Eton, he became a full-time MI5 officer, running agents and conducting interrogations.

He joined the Foreign Office in 1960 and was sent to work at the British embassy in Bonn, a cover for his work as an MI6 agent. He then published his first novel under the pseudonym John le Carré. His career as an intelligence officer ended with the betrayal of British agents to the KGB by Kim Philby, the British double agent. Le Carré featured Philby as “Bill Haydon”, the upper-class traitor, code-named Gerald by the KGB, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It is understood that Cornwell’s private papers could contain further revelations about the Philby saga and Britain’s Cold War exploits – just one of the reasons he wanted his secrets to be published posthumously. So far, he has only confirmed that he was “for a time engaged in that work”, and later said: “Certainly, we did very bad things.” In 1963 The Spy Who Came In from the Cold appeared, making his name, and he resigned from the Foreign Office to write full time. He has lived in St Buryan, Cornwall, where he owns a mile of cliff close to Land’s End, for more than 40 years.

In the past, his private life, too, was something of a tangled web. In 1954, Cornwell married Alison Sharp. They had three sons, Simon, Stephen, and Timothy. When he left the secret service, “David went off the rails a bit”, friends recall, “enjoying himself in predictable ways”. Someone who socialised with him at the time says: “He had affairs. I think it was painful for his wife, who was still in love with him.” He divorced in 1971, marrying Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton, the following year. They had a son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway. It is understood that Cornwell’s love life will be the subject of explicit revelation in the biography. Cornwell has explained that he often feels trapped – and runs. “I was by nature a defector, a bolter. I come from bolting stock. My mother bolted in order to marry my father, bolted again when I was five, and stayed bolted for the rest of my childhood.

My father bolted from his orthodox but repressive upbringing and kept bolting of necessity for most of his life – often from the arm of the law, and sometimes unsuccessfully.” Ronnie Cornwell died in 1975. Cornwell paid for the funeral, but did not attend. He has said that his family history has determined the course of his life. “These things are catching,” he says. “I myself bolted from an English public school at 16; from the burdens of bachelorhood at 23; from the twilight world of British intelligence at 33; and from a first marriage at 36. “An instinct simultaneously to engage in life and escape from it is not unusual in creative people. But I have it in spades. While the patriot and child in me rushed to embrace one great institution after another, so the would-be artist was already secretly packing his bags, tunnelling under the castle walls, and testing the depth of the moat.” Famously reclusive, Cornwell last year gave his final television interview, explaining that his life had to be “solitary” in order for him to perform as a writer.

He maintains that his life is of no great interest, saying: “I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. I write and walk and swim and drink.” It seems certain that his biography will show that he is being somewhat disingenuous, for David Cornwell has in fact led a life as mysterious and intriguing as any of his characters. John Le Carre - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Unabridged) - Read by Michael Jayston - 🔥Demonoid🔥 Details for John Le Carre - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Unabridge Created by SaSfan 1 year ago Audio Books : Fiction : MP3/64Kbps : English John Le Carr? - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Unabridged) - Read by Michael Jayston Source Internet FhG MPEG 1 Layer III 64 Kbps CBR 44100Hz, 16-bit, Mono Found during an Internet trawl, apart from file renaming and tagging it is untouched, treat as "Bought as seen". I realise that there are a lot of Le Carr? books on here, but sadly there is a dearth of reader/narrator information.

So this may well turn out to be a unintentional duplicate, c'est la vie. The book In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse - a desk job - Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service - with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants. The author David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le Carr?, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and it remains one of his best-known works.

Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le Carr? established himself as a writer of espionage fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked le Carr? 22nd on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute. The reader Michael Jayston was born on October 29, 1935 in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England as Michael James. He is an actor, known for Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), Emmerdale (1972) and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972). He has been married to Elizabeth Ann Smithson since 1978. They have two children. He was previously married to Heather Mary Sneddon and Lynn Farleigh.

Show Demonoid some love with LE definition | English definition dictionary | Reverso n the French name for → 's Hertogenbosch fo'c's'le , fo'c'sle n a variant spelling of → forecastle Houghton-le-Spring n a town in N England, in Sunderland unitary authority, Tyne and Wear: coal-mining. Pop.: 35100 (1991) Îles sous le Vent n the French name for the → Leeward Islands → 3 -le suffix forming verbs denoting repeated or continuous action, often of a diminutive nature twiddle, wriggle, wrestle (from Middle English -len, Old English -lian, with similar significance) Le Carré n John, real name David John Cornwell. born 1931, English novelist, esp.

of spy thrillers such as The Spy who came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1980), A Perfect Spy (1986), and The Tailor of Panama (1996) Le Cateau (French) n a town in NE France: site (August 26, 1914) of the largest British battle since Waterloo, which led to the disruption of the German attack on the Allies. Pop.: 9205 (latest est.) Le Chatelier's principle n (Chem) the principle that if a system in chemical equilibrium is subjected to a disturbance it tends to change in a way that opposes this disturbance (C19: named after H. L. Le Chatelier (1850--1936), French chemist) Le Corbusier (French) n real name Charles Édouard Jeanneret. 1887--1965, French architect and town planner, born in Switzerland. He is noted for his use of reinforced concrete and for his modular system, which used units of a standard size.

His works include Unité d'Habitation at Marseilles (1946--52) and the city of Chandigarh, India (1954) Le Creusot (French) n a town in E central France: metal, machinery, and armaments industries. Pop.: 33274 (1983 est.) Le Fanu n (Joseph) Sheridan. 1814--73, Irish writer, best known for his stories of mystery and the supernatural, esp. Uncle Silas (1864) and the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) Le Havre (French) n a port in N France, on the English Channel at the mouth of the River Seine: transatlantic trade; oil refining. Pop.: 197219 (1990) Le Mans (French) n a city in NW France: scene of the first experiments in motoring and flying; annual motor race. Pop.: 148465 (1990) Le Nôtre (French) n André (ɑ̃dre).

1613--1700, French landscape gardener, who created the gardens at Versailles for Louis XIV Le Sage , Lesage (French) n Alain-René (alɛ̃rəne). 1668--1747, French novelist and dramatist, author of the picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715--35) Lons-le-Saunier (French) n a town in E France: saline springs; manufactures sparkling wines. Pop. (conurbation): 210140 (1990) Morgan le Fay , Morgain le Fay n a wicked sorceress of Arthurian legend, the half-sister of King Arthur tout le monde (French) Le Carre - definition of le Carre by The Free Dictionary Le Carre - definition of le Carre by The Free Dictionary Also found in: Thesaurus , Wikipedia . le Car·ré (lə kă-rā′), John Pen name of David John Moore Cornwell. Born 1931.

British writer of popular espionage novels, including The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). Le Carré (lə ˈkæreɪ) n (Biography) John, real name David John Cornwell. born 1931, English novelist, esp of spy thrillers such as The Spy who came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1980), The Tailor of Panama (1996), and The Mission Song (2006) ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend: Want to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us , add a link to this page, or visit the webmaster's page for free fun content . Link to this page: REVIEWS Contract notice: Sccv le carre sainte-therese and sa hlm gambetta rental communities - deconstruction and asbestos removal of a teaching building in angers (49), rue abbe fremond.

Sccv le carre sainte-therese and sa hlm gambetta rental communities - deconstruction and asbestos removal of a teaching building in angers (49), rue abbe fremond STAR BIRTHDAYS Presumably to the MP for Councillor Jess suggests 'looks Don't hold as she is too publicity for of course photo some Mike Butler, SOS Sir Michael Gambon, John Lithgow and Sinitta good ONCE being place by hub (DIY street of our ex I seem years ago planned John Le Carre (David Cornwell), author, 84; Sir Michael Gambon, actor, 75; John Lithgow, actor, 70; Sam Allardyce, football manager and pundit, 61; Evander Holyfield, boxer, 53; Sinitta, actress and singer, 47; Pras Michel, R&B singer/producer, 43 of the being Elizabeth was very about Isn't Second colours let Does John le Carré's bitterness of Britain stem from his jailbird father and the mother who abandoned him? | Daily Mail Online Does John le Carré's bitterness of Britain stem from his jailbird father and the mother who abandoned him?

comments The scene is a great rambling stone house on the cliffs of Cornwall, a stone's throw from Land's End. Dusk is falling, and a whitehaired 76-year- old man sits admiring one of the most beautiful views in England, listening to the sound of the waves breaking on the rocks 50ft beneath him. The man is John le Carré, master of the modern espionage thriller and one of the most successful novelists this country has ever produced, a millionaire several times over, with this stunning house - complete with guest cottage, swimming pool and tropical garden - not to mention another in London's Hampstead to prove it. Yet despite his wealth, and the publication of his 21 acclaimed novels in 36 languages (many of them made into films or television dramas, including, of course, the magnificent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy), le Carré, who will be 77 next month, isn't a contented man: far from it. He is very angry indeed about the country of his birth.

Exploring the psyche of John le Carré, a man of talent and anger Le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell - he adopted the nom-de-plume in 1961 to allow him to write his stories of the world of spies and spooks - takes little pleasure in the politics of the country he spied for during the Cold War. 'People call me an angry old man,' he snapped this week. 'Screw them. I'm angry there is so little anger at what's being done to our society, supposedly in order to protect it'. This elegant, fastidious man, who once taught modern languages at Eton, is furious with the Government for leaving each and every one of us 'stripped of our civil liberties in an atmosphere of panic'. 'Our MPs allow themselves to be deluded by their own spin doctors, and end up believing their own propaganda,' he growled in an article for a magazine this week. 'We haul our Foreign Secretary back from the Middle East so he can vote for 42 days detention. We've sacrificed our sovereignty to a so-called "special relationship" (with the America), which has nothing special about it.' Le Carré doesn't just reserve his fury for Britain.

'I'm not anti-American,' he also claimed. 'But I'm anti the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld disaster of the last eight years.' Le Carré believes that the United States has been 'hijacked' by neo-Conservative extremists and as a result has claimed the right 'to seize any citizen of any country whom it deems offensive to it'. 'America has licensed torture,' he argues. His new novel, A Most Wanted Man, published this week, focuses on the American Government's use of 'extraordinary rendition', which has led to the imprisonment of 27,000 people without trial, according to the author. le Carré believes America has been 'hijacked' and despairs of the 'special relationship' between Britain and the U.S. 'How much of this stuff can we do to ourselves in protection of our democracy and remain a democracy worth protecting?' he asks. This is not the first time that le Carré, who was educated at Sherborne public school, has railed against the prevailing political climate. In 1996, he even talked about leaving Britain to go and live in Panama.

Back then - in the Tory years of John Major's premiership - le Carré was angry about '15 years of catastrophic misgovernment' and 'the obscene and ever-growing gap between the very rich and the very poor'. In contrast, he believed that Panama - famous for its drug runners, political corruption and poverty - had a 'new dawn ahead of it' and that 'possibly a new, politically responsible, generation will emerge and find its voice. I wish I could say the same for England,' he concluded bleakly. Nevertheless, le Carré stayed here. Now, after 11 years of New Labour, he is just as bitter about the state of his own country as he was then. The author of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold has insisted Tony Blair tried to 'ride the tiger' of George Bush's 'colonial adventure' in Iraq and took us to war 'under false pretences'. John le Carré pictured at his home near Penzance, Cornwall Le Carré was incensed by the manipulation of the intelligence services by the Government over the 'dodgy dossier' that took Britain into the war against Iraq in 2003. As a former spy himself, he took that personally.

'In my day - in the spook world,' he said, 'we saw ourselves as people with a priestly calling to tell the truth. We didn't shape it or mould it.' The sense of betrayal le Carré feels at the hands of the British Government is palpable - but he denied claims he ever considered 'changing sides' to the Russians during his time as a spy. He explained in a yet-to-be published letter to a Sunday newspaper that although he 'rationally and imaginatively' understood 'the magnetic pull of such a step, and empathised with it', he never considered taking it. By why should this millionaire author, acknowledged as 'one of the finest storytellers' in modern fiction, despair of his country quite this much? To discover the answer we need to delve into the world of nuance and evasions that le Carré inhabits himself - a world in which he has hidden his lies for many years. Only now are they beginning to emerge from the shadows of his past. The truth is that the man born David John Moore Cornwell in October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, has long kept secrets - two in particular.

For years he told the world he was not a spy during the Cold War, when, in fact, he was, just as he concealed the brutal truth about his deeply unhappy childhood. Family past: Le Carré was brought up by his con-man father - who'd been jailed for fraud when he was an infant When Cornwell began writing his espionage thrillers - his first was Call For The Dead in 1961 - he was working for MI5. He moved on to work for MI6. His spymasters told him to publish his novels under a pseudonym. It's said he chose John le Carré because it had a 'foreign ring to it' and was 'mysterious'. le Carré means 'the square' in French. Just as significantly, le Carré also concealed the dreadful pain of his upbringing, which saw his mother, Olive, leave his rogue of a father Ronnie when he was just five years old. 'I never knew my mother till I was 21,' he accepts now. 'I act like a gent but I am wonderfully badly born.

My father was a trickster and a jailbird.' Le Carré, and his elder brother, Tony, born just two years before him, were brought up by his con-man father - who'd been jailed for fraud when they were infants, as a result of which their mother abandoned them. After his wife left, Ronnie Cornwell packed his young sons off to boarding schools, only to see them in the holidays when they were looked after by what le Carré later called 'lovelies' - female friends of his father, who liked to spend his spare time splashing what money he had in the casinos of Monte Carlo or on the racecourses of Ireland. The author was not to see his mother again until he was 21, when he deliberately went to find her. In archetypal le Carré fashion they met at Ipswich railway station. But it wasn't a totally joyful reunion. They met only a few times more before her death. Le Carré with actor Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the film of le Carré's bestselling book, The Constant Gardener The sense of abandonment by his mother heaped on top of his father's weakness has gnawed away at the author throughout his life.

By the time Ronnie Cornwell died in 1975, his younger son had become a best-selling author, but le Carré never resolved his dispute with him. He paid for his father's funeral, but did not attend. The lies about his life as a spy, and the torment of his childhood inhabit every syllable of his work. It is no accident that his books are inhabited by characters who are failed by their fathers. 'I think that my great villains have always had something of my father in them,' le Carré admits, pointing out that his novel A Perfect Spy in 1985, was his attempt to exorcise his father's ghost - 'a sort of therapy' he has called it. His father's life of subterfuge affected both his sons. le Carré's elder brother Tony has explained: 'He sent us to public school and we believed we were part of the upper class. Then we discovered it was all a fraud.' Perhaps it is this, above anything else, that helps to explain le Carré's fury at the British establishment: and his feeling of being an outsider.

The upright le Carré, who feigned a nervous breakdown to get away from Sherborne at 16, and then lied about his age to get into the University of Berne to study German literature, took refuge from an early age in the role of an outsider. Le Carré's extraordinary life has seen him as both a spy and an author starting in Switzerland when he was recruited as a Cold War agent At 18 he did his National Service - where it's said he first encountered the intelligence corps - before going to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he got a first in modern languages. But le Carré was never a particularly sociable undergraduate. He was then, as he is now, a man of few friends. Indeed he says that his brother and he 'never kept our friends, and I still have few today'. After Oxford, where he met his first wife, Alison Sharp, le Carré taught at Eton for two years, before joining the Foreign Office in 1959, serving first in Bonn and then in Hamburg - where he 'worked behind a desk' as part of his job for MI6.

It was then that he started to write, and it was the international success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, that saw him leave the service to write full-time. Another reason was he had been betrayed to the Russian secret service by the notorious double agent Kim Philby after he defected to the Soviet Union. Le Carré's success did not guarantee happiness, however. After having three sons, he and his wife divorced in 1971. The following year he married Jane Eustace, who worked for his publishers. They have a son, Nick, now also a writer, and have been together ever since. Usually to be found in his Cornish retreat, le Carré is the ultimate outsider, the watcher waiting to point out the frailties of those around him, and no fan of cities, saying: 'three days is about as much as I can stand'. Bestseller: It was the international success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, that saw him leave the service to write full-time His anger is directed at both Left and Right in politics - 'Whatever else David is, he isn't an old Leftie,' says his friend, poet and critic Al Alvarez.

Significantly, le Carré has refused every offer of an honour - 'I will never be Sir David,' he's said repeatedly - and he's every bit as sceptical of the British literary establishment, which he's described as 'corrupt'. In a row with Man Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, for example - who accused him of wanting 'to be taken seriously' and creating 'stick figures' instead of characters - le Carré insisted he would rather take the advice of 'my gardener' than listen to Rushdie's comments. Perhaps the truth is there is a duality at the heart of the man - a sense he wants to be admired by the British establishment on one hand, and yet privately despises it on the other. Next Wednesday, this awkward, private, and sometimes brittle author will make a rare public appearance at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. There, le Carré will no doubt repeat his mantra: 'I despise myself in the fake role of guru. Artists, in my experience, have little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies.

I am no exception.' One member of the audience might just have the temerity to ask him why - if he thinks like that - he devotes so much time to lofty denunciations of his own country. When we put that question to him this week, the answer was a deafening silence. John le Carré: The spy master | The Independent Profiles John le Carré: The spy master An acclaimed big-screen adaptation of his best-known work is bringing Britain's eminence grise of espionage fiction a new generation of admirers. Friday 16 September 2011 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online John Le Carre: "A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population." Rex Features When Yevgeny Primakov, a former KGB chieftain who led the post-Soviet foreign intelligence service, became Russia's foreign minister in the mid-1990s, he dined in London with John le Carré. "So who do you identify with in my work?" the novelist and former spook asked his fellow-survivor of the Cold War shadow-world. "Smiley, of course!" Primakov replied.

From the time of his first proper espionage novel in 1963, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the author born as David John Cornwell began to build a twilit house of mirrors. Inside his fiction, doubles, distortions and delusions trapped apparent enemies into a mutually dependent system of organised duplicity. It binds its members absolutely, determining their life or death, while leaving outsiders truly out in the cold. Subject to its own laws and myths, arranged according to a logic and design that turns its back on civilian reality, the intelligence netherworld that Le Carré fashioned has the quality of all great literary myths. As much as in Tolkien, Wodehouse, Chandler or even Jane Austen, this closed world is a whole world. Its claims to documentary authenticity, however strong, hardly matter any more. Via the British "Circus" and its Soviet counterpart, Le Carré created a laboratory of human nature; a test-track where the innate fractures of the heart and mind could be driven to destruction. That is why Le Carré has survived, and thrived, two decades after the fall of the Warsaw Pact.

Thomas Alfredson's film of his 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opened this week to near-ecstatic reviews – not least from Le Carré himself. It will play to many viewers who were not even alive when the Berlin Wall fell and the division of Europe – the original sin that lies behind Le Carré's multi-volume epic – slowly began to heal. The success of a film which on every level respects its literary original hints that Le Carré's long-term prospects now look rosy again. That has not always been a cert. After the Cold War ended, critics and readers wondered where the genre of the espionage thriller – with Le Carré as its peerless practitioner – would turn next. He seemed to share those fears of redundancy. "Smiley is above all a European," he has said. After the postwar wounds of Europe appeared to close, Le Carré determined to take a global view of power, secrecy and resistance.

The 1990s and 2000s saw him take on fresh targets and relocate to more distant scenes: Latin American drug cartels in The Night Manager; Big Pharma's machinations in east Africa for The Constant Gardener, Central American imbroglios for The Tailor of Panama, western meddling in Congo, and its unreported slaughters, in The Mission Song. Yet his adjustment to a multi-polar geopolitics, with corporate malpractice as much a threat as state intrigue, sometimes felt uncomfortable, however righteous – and increasingly vocal – his anger against the skulduggery practised by bankers rather than spies. Inevitably, perhaps, he has shown signs of nostalgia for the tawdry and compromised domain where Smiley and Karla ruled. In his latest, 21st novel, Our Kind of Traitor, the scornful satire of City of London money-laundering sounds laboured: Le Carré has stood in the front row of the bankers' critics and has claimed that Russian cash from criminal sources helped the City weather the storm of 2008.

Yet the latest novel really catches fire when he return to the worn-out veterans of the "Service" in London, as bruised and bitchy as ever, or dramatises the tough Soviet background of a – rather sympathetic – kingpin of the Russian mafias. Le Carré re-imagines the intelligence underworld; he does not report it. Yet, of course, his own background and experience shaped the contours of this unique literary landscape. Famously, he learnt about subterfuge, deception and betrayal not as a spy but as a child. His father Ronnie was a con-man, in and out of jail and the bankruptcy courts, as familiar with Wormwood Scrubs as the Savoy Grill. Le Carré's mother left when he was five. His half-siblings include the actress Charlotte Cornwell and Rupert Cornwell of The Independent. The family fortunes soared and dived.

"When there was Bentley in the front garden, we were up," Le Carré said during a revealing autobiographical talk at the Oxford Literary Festival last year: "And when it disappeared we were down and – quite possibly – out." Ronnie, who has never ceased to "fascinate and enchant" his son, stands near the centre of A Perfect Spy, the 1986 novel that for many admirers still counts as his most accomplished single novel. During the Second World War, the young Le Carré (born in 1931) found himself "squeezing black market figs into laxative tablets" in Aberdeen at Ronnie's behest. From judges to tarts, jockeys to MPs, his errant father's own circus of hangers-on (in the good times) still, he says, inspire him whenever he needs a fruity "walk-on part". In 1987, in Corfu, he met one of his father's old confrères. "We was all bent," the veteran fondly recalled. "But your dad was very bent indeed." Le Carré sums up the legacy of this shape-shifting patriarch of dreams and lies.

"In Ronnie's bookless households, you survived or failed by your wits alone. So in a sense, I had done my spy's training in advance." He entered the state-sponsored shadows via a roundabout route. As a student in Bern he had fallen in love with German language and literature – a passion requited last month when he received the Goethe Medal in Weimar. He studied German at Lincoln College, Oxford. There, the historian and later Rector, Vivian HH Green, provided the most likely model for George Smiley (and not, as often assumed, the former MI6 chief Sir Maurice Oldfield). The young David Cornwell taught languages at Eton for a while. Was he, he wonders, trying to compensate for the insecurities and humiliations of his childhood? Then, in 1958, he joined MI5. The security service he entered was unfit for purpose, in his view, a broken-down "paradigm of post-war, post-imperial Britain at its lowest ebb". After three years, he transferred to the more glamorous but leak-prone secret intelligence service, MI6. He worked in Bonn, that small town in Germany, supposedly as Second Secretary at the British embassy.

In 1961, the erection of the Berlin Wall drove the young agent to fury and frustration. His response (after two earlier, more routine thrillers) took the form of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In 1964, by which point the defection of Kim Philby had severely compromised many agents' cover, he left the Service to write full-time. Married to his second wife since 1972, he has for four decades lived near Land's End in Cornwall, where he owns a stretch of cliff. His son, who writes as Nick Harkaway, will publish a second novel in 2012. As Le Carré reports, his years in the underworld had a curious coda. Much later, the former MI5 head Sir Roger Hollis used to come to visit him at home in Somerset, apparently seeking refuge from some unspecified threat. It turned out that Hollis was under investigation as a suspected Soviet agent. He was not, so Le Carré believes and as Chris Andrew's authorised history of MI5 seems to confirm. "The cock-ups on his watch were just cock-ups".

Those "cock-ups", the offspring of human frailty, self-doubt and self-deception, thread through Le Carré's narrative of the Cold War as a chapter of accidents as much as a battle of ideologies. Smiley, memorably incarnated first by Alec Guinness in the 1979 BBC series and now by Gary Oldman, emerges as a flawed philosopher-priest who merely aspires to limit the harm and pain that human weakness spreads. The betrayals he clears up all stem from self-betrayal. And the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall – or whichever symbol of division the theatre of politics currently prefers – will always run right down the middle of the human soul. A life in brief Born: David John Cornwell, 19 October 1931, Poole, Dorset. Family: Married Alison Sharp in 1954; three sons. Divorced 1971. Married Valerie Eustace; one son. Education: Attended Sherborne school, then University of Bern. Later went to Oxford. Career: Joined the British Intelligence Corp in 1950, then worked for MI5.

Began writing in the 1960s as John le Carré. He says: "A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population." They say: "He is charming, entertaining, and very bright," author Robert Harris. More about: 21 Novels by John le Carre (ePub Retail) (download torrent) - TPB Get this torrent (Problems with magnets links are fixed by upgrading your torrent client !) David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le Carré (pron.: /lə ˈkɑrˌeɪ/), is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, when he began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and remains one of his best-known works. Following the novel's success, he left MI6 to become a full-time author.

Smiley: A Call for the Dead (1961) A Murder of Quality (1962) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) The Looking Glass War (1965) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Smiley's People (1979) The Secret Pilgrim (1990) Novels: A Small Town in Germany (1968) The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) The Little Drummer Girl (1983) A Perfect Spy (1986) The Russia House (1989) The Night Manager (1993) The Tailor of Panama (1996) Single and Single (1999) The Constant Gardener (2000) Absolute Friends (2003) The Mission Song (2006) A Most Wanted Man (2008) Our Kind of Traitor (2010) A Delicate Truth (2013) All but 4 of them are US Retail ePubs.

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Question: Which well known author was born David John Cornwell in 1931?
Answer: John le Carre